Fun With Your New Head

Coming to a piano factory near you... the Messiah!

Okay, I exaggerate somewhat. In fact it's a sparkling new play by the indefatigably bewildered Sean Michael Welch. Reluctantly based in New York City, land of crumpled yogurt containers, Welch whiles away the hours fighting mail fraud & selling subversive literature to nuns, biding his time until he becomes the next brilliant playwright you've never heard of because you don't leave the house much these days & they don't feature him on Masterpiece Theatre because he's not dead yet. Regardless, he's got a body of quality work behind him more vast than many playwrights twice as dead as him.

Welch's first big success was Earl the Vampire, which won big bucks at ACTF & was subsequently published by Samuel French. Manufacturers of plastic vampire teeth reported record high sales that year. Coincidence? Could very well be. Success number two was Boise, Idaho (the play, not the city) which was published by Francis Ford Coppola's swanky Zoetrope Magazine & has been performed in all sorts of weird countries which I can't spell. To this day the citizens of Boise, land of unbreakable shoelaces, proclaim their adoration of Welch for putting their town on the map. Aside from his achievements in playwrighting & cartography, Welch has also been churning out film scripts & novels at an alarming rate. Recently he's been negotiating to have his quasi-Pythonesque screenplay Well Done, Pear Danube! turned into a film of Pantagruelian proportions. And that's far from all.

His style is eerily similar to Harold Pinter forced at gunpoint to write episodes for Three's Company. In fact, Welch claims he learned everything he knows about comedy from John Ritter. Of course he's also been known to say that about Robespierre & Manfred von Richthofen, so we tend to take such remarks with a slug of salt.

The new play is called The Trojan Whore & we feel you'll agree when you see it. Whore is being staged by the Mill 6 theatre troupe, who also claim moral responsibility for previous performances of Welch's Boise, Try Not To Step on the Naked Man, & The Last Adventure of Lance Adventure in Boston, land of belligerent fire hydrants. It promises to be funnier than anything you can possibly fathom. I recommend you go see it immediately, or risk having your kneecaps bitten off by anthrax-infected raccoons. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Here's the bird's-eye lowdown.